Honestly, I don't think is was bought. Wood burning stoves are a huge, huge source of dangerous particulate pollutions in many states in the north, where there is not the option to use gas, and oil is too expensive for many families. Fairbanks, AK, a community of about 100,000k people, has some of the worst particulate pollution in the developed world because of the amount of woodburning that goes on there during the winter.

Yes, I have to agree, it's certainly not bought. Burning fossil fuels does seem to be way more sensible.
(beware of sarcasm)

To be honest, I don't live in the US, I live in Germany and use wood burning since years, about 10m^3 per year. Here in the south of Germany we have massive sustainable forestry, leaving over tons of firewood every year. It's cheap, most independent and my emissions in any way are lower compared to using oil or electric energy for heat in winter.
I have to agree that there is a prob

and that's why that area has such low life expectancy? oh wait, no they don't, it's average for the USA. Maybe that biofuel isn't so bad compared to coal burning. Maybe the EPA and most the rest of the federal government needs to be cut down to a fraction of its bloated size

We need the EPA. We just need to put people in charge there that have a clue. That, of course, would take a government that had a clue. Sadly........

No, we don't need the EPA. We need the legislative branch to stop ceding its responsibilities to the executive. Where laws are required, they must come from the legislature, not random executive departments gone haywire.

Come on, give me a break. It's not all about instant death, it's more often about about quality of life.

A few years ago I inexplicably developed asthma in Northern California (I have never had a single allergy, etc in 40 years). The doctor said she had seen a huge number of the same cases due to major fires south of San Jose that year (so bad some days you could see a haze in the air 50+ miles away). And I have never had the symptoms since (well, actually - one time - hanging out in a bar in IL before they instituted the smoking ban... so it's pretty clear what triggers it...)

There are so few CEO's that they can't be the main problem. If you confiscate all the wealth of all the billionaires, in total, you get 2 months of government spending.

In 1970 a CEO earned 14 times as much as a janitor, now he "earns" 400 times as much. We need more regulation, not less, starting with a far higher minimum wage. Ours is pathetic compared to the rest of the industrialized world.

That's not how money works. Whatever the minimum wage is, that's the low bar. Set it to $100 an hour. What's the person who's now making $20/hr going to do? The prices in the stores have all gone up to pay $100/hr wages, so he needs to get $250/hr. All you've done is erode the value of everybody's savings.

What is true is that in 1964, the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour and gas was 25 cents a gallon. That $1.25 could be paid in five quarters of real money. That same money now has an intrinsic value of about $22. If you want to go by gas prices alone, that's $15/hr, but gas production has become much more efficient, so if you study actual gas production costs, that's really $30/hr.

After the Vietnam War bankrupted the US government, it embraced socialist money (August 1971). The real inflation rate since that time is tremendous. Not only did that leave the minimum wage behind (which is used as a political football) it meant that everybody who wanted to have savings needed to push that money to Wall Street (401(k), etc.) because local S&L interest rates never kept up with real inflation. That giant sucking sound is all the local economies crumbling because of a lack of capital for small business, which lead to the big box revolution, hedge fund domination, and the like.

If you want the poor to do worse, you'll favor ever increasing regulation. That is, after all, what the rich people who control the government continually get. And a $7 minimum wage that is insulting to humanity.

Slaving away at a stressful job that you don't have your heart in during the winter months, largely just to make money to pay someone far away to refine/convert/combust some manner of fossil fuel into "natural gas" or "electricity..." just to stay warm for the few hours a day that you actually get to be at home.

It also looks like this has become a minor right-wing cause. Jack-booted thugs coming to take away your wood-burning stoves, and all that.

The right wing tends to be against regulation that erodes personal freedoms. This particular rule may or may not be a good idea, but the healthy thing for society is to look at all new regulation with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion.

The right wing tends to be against regs that they/think/ affect people like them. Other people? Fuck 'em, I got mine.

That's American culture. I am reminded of that each time someone in a car pulls out in front of me, nearly causing an accident, when a five-second wait would have left the entire road to himself. Any sort of kindness or patience is viewed as submission and subservience, it would seem.

The failure of course is a simple misunderstanding. Kindness and patience are about what sort of person I am, not what sort of person the other guy is.

It also looks like this has become a minor right-wing cause. Jack-booted thugs coming to take away your wood-burning stoves, and all that.

The right wing tends to be against regulation that erodes personal freedoms. This particular rule may or may not be a good idea, but the healthy thing for society is to look at all new regulation with a healthy dose of skepticism and suspicion.

You have got to be joking. The same right-wing that is calling for anti-abortion law across all the state where they have uncontested power? The same right-wing that is taking away the right to vote in the same states?

I bet most foods are too salty for you, aren't they? I remember in art metals class in college, I was melting some beeswax for a pattern. A fellow student walked up to me and told me I was heating the wax too hot and the burning wax smoke (there was no smoke) was carcinogenic. I asked him if he liked candles, he said yes. He didn't get it.

I grew up in a house with a wood furnace, that house still has a wood furnace and not a single member of my family that either grew up or continues to live in that house has any kind of lung ailment. Hell, I run marathons.

More to the point though, you seem to have confused fireplace with furnace. The only reason smoke would get in your house from a furnace is if something was terribly broken.

Thankfully I live in Canada so this law won't effect all the people I know that rely on wood furnaces for heat and would likely have to invest $10,000+ if they ever had to switch away from wood as a fuel source.

I grew up in a house with a wood furnace, that house still has a wood furnace and not a single member of my family that either grew up or continues to live in that house has any kind of lung ailment. Hell, I run marathons.

Wow. You sound exactly like those people who say "I smoke 20 a day for 50 years and I'm fit as a fiddle". Lucky you, if it's true, but even so we are pretty sure cigarettes cause cancer now. The effects of particulate matter, especially PM2.5, are well understood. Denying the overwhelming scientific and medical evidence is just dumb. Sorry, but it is.

Note also that not all furnaces have been banned, just the ones that don't capture the particulate matter and vent it into the atmosphere. You can still buy good quality ones, just not the high pollution varieties.

Lets say we live next to each other, lets say that you are struggling and have little money. For whatever reason, the only way to earn money that you have right now is to accept barrels of toxic chemicals and store them on your property (the chemical company pays you for this).

Now lets say one or two start leaking and it starts to affect the health of my family.

It strikes me as reasonable to ask the government to step in and tell you that you can't have such things on your property because it affects me.

Why the government? Because my other option (if we remove government) is to come over to your house and shoot you. I don't think we want to live in THAT world.

So back to government. The government (local, state, federal, whatever) passes a law that says you can't store toxic chemicals in your backyard.

You complain saying that this is hurting you, you have no other money and this is your only way to survive. Fine, but your right to make money and survive doesn't give you the right to screw up the environment around you and harm others, you'll have to figure something else out.

Otherwise, people like me will hire our government (via our tax dollars) to send some people over and make you stop. Because we don't want you to do what you're doing because it harms us.

Either the government will send people over to force the issue, or I could do it myself.

If you are doing something that I want stopped and you won't stop, my only two options are to pay the government (via taxes) to force the issue, or to force it myself.

The idea is that if someone wants to be difficult, sooner or later, someone (or multiple people) with guns will have to resolve the issue.

If two people disagree, and can just leave each other alone, fine. But if one side or the other decides that the current situation is not acceptable and the other side won't discuss it, then violence is the only remaining solution.

Works at the local level, works at the national level, we called them duels back in the day, when nations do it, we call them wars.

.........

BTW, if you missed the third option, which was to move, then you missed the whole point. I can't move, I live on Earth and have no where else to go. The pollution that humans have been doing for the past hundred years affects us all, I can't move far enough away to get away from it. You're my neighbor if you live next door, or 10,000 miles away.

What is so insane about that is that I actually agree, but I'd do it another way...

Lots of people who need to replace this old stuff don't need a tax break, they don't pay enough in taxes (the kind that you can use such breaks for anyway) to make it help.

I would provide low interest loans, secured by a lien against the house, for people to buy such things. Many people can't get credit, or it is very expensive, but if the goal is to get people to replace old and very inefficient appliances, HVAC systems, etc. then instead of tax breaks, provide the money in the form of a loan.

Frankly, most people replacing a 20 year old HVAC system with a new 16 SEER unit would probably find that a 10 year low interest loan would cost the same or less than the reduction in their monthly electric bill, making it a "free" upgrade.

In US politics, liberal means socialist or some weak form of socialism.

The term originally did mean freedom but the modern "liberal" parties are only liberal in their approach to SOME social issues. Homosexuality for example is something most "liberals" are liberal about. But when it comes to economic policy, environmental policy, health policy, safety policy, etc they are not actually liberal. If they were liberal then they'd let people make their own choices and not impose government restrictions and edicts on everything.

Do not confuse liberty with anarchy. Freedom does not mean no government at all. The difference is between consensual action and non-consensual action.

For example, if I point a gun at someone's head and tell them to give me something that is something the government has a right and responsibility to act upon. However, if I talk to someone and ask them for something and they consensually provide it, then the government has no right to influence that situation unless its willing to breach individual rights.

Political distinctions address... On the subject of wood burning stoves, I think it all boils down to population density and the frequency of use. Banning wood burning stoves indifferent to zoning, population density, and frequency of use is actually pretty irrational. Do you really care if some guy in the mountains is using a wood burning stove in his cabin? Its not an environmental problem. Furthermore, what if you have a city with 10 million people in it and five people use wood burning stoves. Also not an environmental problem. Etc.

So for this law to be rational it has to take all of that into consideration rather then just blanketly banning their use. Banning them entirely is actually a really bad idea for a few reasons. One, many people will simply not follow the law and there is no means to actually enforce it. You're not going to inspect kitchens in rural house holds. Which means you've created a law that will not be followed which will then undermine all other laws. You're making people feel comfortable breaking the law. Because once everyone breaks one law they become more comfortable breaking others. And the law increasingly loses moral authority. When that happens the law becomes not a matter of right or wrong but rather what you have the police to enforce. You lose community support. There is no moral stigma for violations. The second problem with this law is that it hurts people that aren't hurting anyone else. There are a lot of people in rural communities that need to use wood burning stoves. I have an uncle that lives in a cabin in the woods. The man heats his home and cooks his meals with a wood burning stove. He's in the middle of giant forest and has to keep brush clear of his property on a regular basis. That brush must be burned. Understand, if he doesn't burn it then nature will. The area goes through a burn phase as intervals naturally. And even if he didn't burn it, it would be impractical to mulch or dispose of otherwise. So its going to burn. If its going to burn one way or another, why not use the energy released to heat the home and cook food? Right?

Look, no one is arguing for wood burning stoves in Manhattan or something. But if you're in a rural community wood burning stoves are not a problem for the environment.

This is the worst summary ever. Here's the real situation:* EPA is tightening existing standards for new wood stoves. Wood stove makers will adopt new control technology to meet these standards.* these standards do NOT apply to stoves already in use* they're NOT making it illegal to burn wood

I'm not entirely against this rule, but I think it should be a local law not a national one. Someone in the middle of the city burning things is a pretty big asshole; someone living in a cabin in the woods isn't causing local problems and could possibly have circumstances that make the usage more understandable -- e.g., using wood that otherwise would go to waste, or using it as a back-up fuel source in case something goes wrong in the middle of winter.

Not to mention that the fairest thing would be to judge each person's energy usage rather than ban particular uses of energy. Piecemeal laws like this are why we end up with absurdities such as the government often giving "green" incentives to wasteful people because they waste through sheer mass of usage (e.g., having a gigantic home) while each particular element in the massive waste is efficient.

Excuse me, I have asthma. And this bullshit about "particulate" count is just that, bullshit. The reason wood burning stoves are being banned in municipalities is because some people don't like the smell of burning wood, or the lingering smoke... and yes, on some days, it can linger. If everyone in suburbia was burning wood during the winter, we'd look like Shanghai. That's true; But that's not because wood stoves are environmentally unfriendly, but because we've packed ourselves in like sardines to the poi

Excuse me, I have asthma. And this bullshit about "particulate" count is just that, bullshit. The reason wood burning stoves are being banned in municipalities is because some people don't like the smell of burning wood, or the lingering smoke

Your whole post is complete and utter bullshit. Wood smoke is the single largest source of PM air pollution in the Bay Area in the winter, and had been for decades (yes, more than cars). You didn't cite a single source in your post because you can't.

At an eco-system level, burning wood is better for the environment than the total pollution from extraction,refining, and transport, of natural gas and propane.

Holy shit, that's so untrue it's mind boggling. If you want to compare current gas use vs current wood use, sure, but if you were to replace gas with wood YOU SAID SO YOURSELF we'd look like a polluted Chinese city (probably worse). So, what a horrible false analogy!

The air quality in many cities is already too low; So ostensibly, we have to reduce it any way we can, not for environmental reasons per-se, but quality of life. Cars stink. And burning wood would just make the cities stink that much more.

Another awful misconception! You think the only problem with air quality is the smell? Seriously?? How on earth is "quality of life" from *breathing* not an environmental issue? As an anecdote (that I mentioned in another thread) about 5 years ago there were major fires south of the Bay Area, CA that resulted in some horrible air quality (sort of like a lot of people burning wood). It's the first time in my life I had asthma, and I was freaked out and went to the doctor. She said she had seen a bunch of cases of people who had it for the first time because of massive amount of wood smoke coming from the fires that year. Not surprisingly, I have never had it again.

So, yeah, sure, replace all of the natural gas heat with wood stoves, and see what that does for "quality of life"...

there were major fires south of the Bay Area, CA that resulted in some horrible air quality (sort of like a lot of people burning wood).

Except wildfires are nothing like people burning wood. The type of stove currently being banned produces far fewer particulates per kg of wood burned than a wildfire. Even Ben Franklin's stove of 1741 [wikipedia.org] produced fewer particulates than a wildfire.

I've experienced smoke from a wildfire 15 miles away entering my neighborhood; and I've experienced cold days when lots of neighbors were using woodstoves. There is no comparison. The former was a miserable experience. The latter was a pleasant experience.

Again, you're so small-minded that you can't conceive that air pollution (smoke) is bad for other people.

I must have been *imagining* that my dad's woodstove made me use my inhaler more often. Fuckwit.

Perhaps your anger (or passion, if you prefer) is supposed to make you more convincing. It only actually makes you appear more malicious and less reasonable. The more important and close-to-home the subject is, the more critical it is not to succumb to such petty temptations.

I would love to know which gas / propane / electric company bought this rule....

Yeah it's another bullshit EPA rule. Did you know that there are cars that emit about half the pollutants into the atmosphere that current EPA-certified cars do by volume? But they're illegal to sell here because the percentage of certain emissions is too high. In other words, we could do less environmental damage per car with (some) imports, but they're illegal because they won't spend a fortune fitting rare-earth metal infested catalytic converters and other emissions systems that, in reality, don't help the environment much -- but they're super expensive and only a few companies sell them here.

Burning wood is a very efficient way to heat a home. A small home within the arctic circle can keep warming with just a few logs a day; A chord of wood can last them the entire winter; Which is maybe about half of what a single decently mature tree will yield. I used to live on a 30 acre plot of woods growing up in a rural area. We had a furnace to keep the pipes from freezing when we were away for long periods, but the house itself was the size of a barn and was poorly insulated. Even at that, we only needed about 8 logs a day to keep it nice and toasty at 80F. The roof almost never had snow on it unless it was fresh.

We'd go out in the winter with out little plastic sleds (I was 12) and I'd haul down about 20 logs at a time to the truck and load it up... Then help cut it up and leave it out on a tarp to dry in the sun. Two, maybe three dead trees in the winter was all we needed to keep our massive and poorly insulated house cooking all winter. And up here in the northern midwest of the United States, we're at the same latitude as Moscow. It gets cold.

By comparison, to heat our house with propane, we'd need to fill our giant tank up about 5 times during the winter, at the cost of a few thousand dollars. As opposed to the gas and oil for the chainsaw... which cost about $20, and the excercise, which I suppose you could say was paid for in pancakes.

You think about that for a minute now -- all the pollutants we have to burn off, all the electricity we spend, all the labor, and all the extra pollution from transporting it all over the country, to get that propane into the tank... as opposed to just going outside, walking a few hundred feet, and going chop-chop. Those few acres of woods could provide for about ten homes' worth of nearly free heat, and the only pollutant would be carbon. Now think of the average forest fire in California; Think of the hundreds of thousands of trees that go up in flames. California could provide heat for next to nothing to all those homes up along the mountains and keep the ferocity of those forest fires down, by logging the dead trees. Not clear-cut logging like the environmentalists like to showcase... but just the dead trees; Move in on foot, haul them out on sleds.

But they'd rather you buy the dry heat from a propane or natural gas tap... because it's more environmentally friendly?

Dude, if you believe that bullshit cover story, you're smoking the cheap $3 crack. Raw oil comes to us on supertankers, and there are no environmental restrictions on the oil those things burn. They are so dirty you can't bring them up-wind less than fifty miles of a major city because you'd have people hospitalized for asthma attacks. A significant portion of our environmental pollution is from these supertankers, powered by the most unrefined, shitty oil you can imagine... it's black like the night and you can see chunks of particulate floating in the tanks, so big you can grab them with your bare hands.

Environmentalism is a joke... it's just an excuse to let some people get rich at the expense of the rest of us, while making some appeal to the planet that'll fend off the opposition.

Footnote: The type of stove we used was a very primitive double-barrel wood stove. It's exactly as the name implies; It's just two barrels stacked, with a pipe between them, and a stack out the top. You start a fire in the bottom one. It was a beautiful thing to stand next to growing up -- back of it would actually glow a faint and deep red... it would radiate heat out fifty feet in every direction. I used to stand there first thing in the morning and cook my backside and legs red just soaking in that delicious heat before I had to go to school. You could throw your sopping-wet snow pants on the top barrel, and in two minutes pull it off and it'd be dry as a bone.. and on fire if you weren't careful. God I loved that thing. Made walking a mile through the snow-covered trail that led to the county road where the bus picked us up every morning (at 6:30am) in the winter bearable. And no, it wasn't up hill both ways, but the wind would cut through any kind of clothing like razors. I'd stand up against a tree to shelter myself until the bus was in sight. I lived in a county where one day the wind chill was reported at -80, but there was no snow fall... so the governor declared the schools would remain open. They had to call a special session of the legislature to override him: Apparently having kids freeze to death in as little as 15 minutes wasn't so cool with them. The new law? -50. And people joke about it being cold in Russia... fuck. They got nothing on the northern Midwest.

On a totally unrelated note, there is one small problem with wood stoves we had; The dog. Damn thing loved the heat it pumped out, but it would go a-wagging it's tail and catch fire. If you've ever smelled burnt dog, then you know the smell of burning wood is heavenly by comparison. Cats at least are smart enough to only catch fire once or twice. Damn dog though... every other week it was flaming lab! Yeesh. #countrybumpkinproblems

Environmentalism isn't a joke, the fact is that there are cities in the world today that you can go to and they are so filled with smog that you can hardly breath. We had this problem back in the 60's and 70's, which is what created the EPA in the first place.

The issue isn't *you* and the single stove, it is 10 million people doing the same thing. Each small bit adds up to a large bit.

The thing is, burning wood is fine, if you have a modern stove that does it at the right temp, you use dried out wood, and you don't release so much crap into the air.

The EPA isn't saying you can't have a wood burning stove, they are just saying that you need one that doesn't suck.

I remember Los Angeles in 1980 and recently, The difference in pollution levels is stunning. I've also been to big Chinese cities and seen the pollution there. I don't know about each rule separately, but overall the emissions restrictions from the EPA have made a huge difference.

I live in rural South Carolina where wood stoves are the only source of heat for many many people. There is no gas infrastructure here, and many people can't afford a $10K electric heating system that will cost them HUNDREDS per month to heat their homes in the winter. At ~$4/gallon, Propane and Oil are similarly prohibitive for the rural poor.

The busybodies in our government have no problem throwing the poor under the bus to achieve some feel-good goal so they can go home to their mansions at night and feel good about themselves. They're hurting real people.

The busybodies in gov't also have no problem subsidizing their energy costs, but that gets blocked in favor of 'deficit reduction' despite the fact that it's not even a drop in a the swimming pool much less the bucket. There's a reason why Red States get more tax dollars than Blue ones. The Blue ones are full of busy bodies trying to help.

OTOH, the wealthy living in rural areas because they left the rotting cities don't much like the poors dirtying up the air. Read some of the other posts. Wood burning stoves in reasonably well populated areas put out a lot more particulate than you think.

So the next time you blame a liberal busy body stop and think about what's really going on and who really benefits...

The busybodies in our government have no problem throwing the poor under the bus to achieve some feel-good goal so they can go home to their mansions at night and feel good about themselves. They're hurting real people.

Those with the inefficient wood stoves are the ones "hurting real people". Those "rural South Carolina" homes can continue to use their old crappy stoves. Any new homes just need to get more efficient-burning models that run about $700. Not a big added expense, and will burn 1/3rd less wood for the same amount of heat, SAVING money in the long-term.

It's possible to assist the poor with buying better stoves, and the up-front costs of doing so would probably be lower than the residual Medicare and Medicaid payouts for respiratory diseases caused or worsened by their old stoves. A higher quality stove with better fittings would also produce an incredible increase in heat output; replacing an old model can truly make the difference between shivering around the stove at night and being perfectly comfortable anywhere within 25 feet. If they pay for the wood, the stove will definitely pay itself off eventually; even if they cut wood themselves the time savings will be substantial and that time could be put to higher value activities like work, study, or even hunting.

But I guess it's easier to denigrate every federal employee as a rich, do-nothing "busybody" who drives home to their "mansion" after "throwing the poor under the bus" than it is to see an obvious solution where the poor are healthier and more comfortable for less money than we're already putting out, and everyone breathes less soot.

Yeah, I love a good warm fire as much as anyone. Spent my fair share of my childhood years throwing wood in the back of a pickup or stacking wood in the shed and warming up by a hot fireplace on cold winter mornings and evenings. It's a very efficient and inexpensive way to heat a home. There is a lot of emotion attached to it, and for good reason. But there are a ton of people out there who are still using stupidly inefficient wood fireplaces that were already outclassed by fireplaces invented over a hundred years ago, including completely open fireplaces which waste ridiculous amounts of heat and burn too cool to properly burn wood cleanly.

My father became a dealer for a line of fireplaces back in the mid-80s. These things were amazing. You start it, let it get hot for a few minutes then seal the door, damp the flu and turn down the incoming air and then you could watch the smoke recirculate and reburn inside. It put out massive amounts of heat for several hours on just two quarters of a log, and when you walked outside the only thing that gave away that the fireplace was in operation were the telltale heat waves coming out of the chimney. No visible smoke whatsoever after it got started. And these highly efficient and clean-burning stoves were available in the 80s and probably much earlier.

Contrast that with walking around the neighborhood or driving around my small town in Alaska on a cool morning or evening. The whole place is full of wood smoke from obviously inefficient wood-burning fireplaces. And because of downdrafts and inversions it tends to stay very low and hang around. We often have smoke coming in our house from houses blocks away whenever we open the window for some "fresh" air. There's really no excuse for this when I could have a stove decades ago that basically had zero detectable particulate output when it was running properly. Plus it made the wood last a lot longer.

Burning wood is air pollution no matter how you slice it, and people need to be strongly encouraged to do it as efficiently as possible. Just like vehicle regulations this only applies to newly manufactured stoves, and all those rural conspiracy theory fruit loops ranting about EPA SWAT teams coming to break down their door and take away their fireplace are just that; fruit loops. This is really much ado about not very much.

The busybodies in our government have no problem throwing the poor under the bus to achieve some feel-good goal so they can go home to their mansions at night and feel good about themselves. They're hurting real people.

All this rule changes is the efficiency for NEW wood burning stoves. It doesn't make them even cost any more. It just means they run more efficiently and put out less smoke. Pre-existing stoves don't need to be pulled out or anything.

So for the rural poor that means less cost for heating (or work of chopping wood if you prefer), and less lung disease, for really no increased cost.

I live in rural South Carolina where wood stoves are the only source of heat for many many people.

I did a Google search for "buy efa-compliant wood stoves" (duh) and found lots of stoves for under $1,000, some of them $6-700.

They can continue to use their old wood stoves. They just can't buy a new wood stove that isn't compliant.

There's a reason for that. Wood (and coal) stoves really are dangerous to have in your home, because of the air pollution. It's like smoking a pack a day of cigarettes. They increase the rate of lung and heart diseases significantly.

Perhaps you live right next to 100 houses all burning wood and your air is polluted as hell but that's still a local problem, for you and your local government and courts to deal with, not something EPA should regulate nationally.

There are some efficiencies in having consumer standards that are more widely applied than at the local level however. It is convenient to have all stoves manufactured be legal to operate in all places in the country, much less convenient to have a gazillion different standards and enforcement systems across the country. We see these difficulties with auto emission standards which are different in different states for example. Having standards that are mutually exclusive can even happen, when meeting the standards in one region forces you to contravene the standards in another.

With that said, I think the data on particulate air pollution is fairly well understood, and requiring new stoves to be cleaner does not seem too unreasonable.

I have lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, which has roughly 100,000 people in and around it, and is basically isolated other than that. During the winter, particulate pollution is insanely bad, and even worse when you consider how small the city is. This is due, mainly, to the amount of wood burning stoves that are used to heat houses. Now, it's exacerbated by the valley that the town is in and the extreme cold, but most of it's terribleness comes from the wood burning in the area. After seeing that, I want to support stronger regulations or even bans on wood burning. On the other hand, many of the people in Fairbanks that burn wood do so because it's the cheapest method they can use to heat their houses, and they can't afford other methods (natural gas is not available in Fairbanks for heating, or at least not cheaply). I don't know what they're supposed to do if these regulations increase the cost associated with wood burning very much... not heating your house when it's -50 out is just not an option.

That's one major reason I wanted to bring this story here. Poor choices regarding the regulation of wood stoves can (as those regulations squeeze the availability of these stoves) result in deaths, especially since manufacturing repair parts for "illegal" stoves is a consequence of "you can't manufacture these stoves."

It's not like people use wood stoves to drive the kids to school; they're mostly used to avoid the hazards of freezing temperatures in the winter. Frostbite and hypothermia aren't commonly seen as positive outcomes of government regulations.

Poor choices regarding the regulation of wood stoves can (as those regulations squeeze the availability of these stoves) result in deaths,

If you're going to talk about deaths, old-style wood-burning stoves are a major cause of indoor air pollution, and they cause a significant increase in eventually-fatal lung and heart disease. It's like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In round numbers, it would cost you about 10 years of life expectancy.

As someone who lives in a rural area and burns wood as a secondary heat source (oil is primary), I think this may be getting blown out of proportion. For years they've been driving up efficiency of wood-stoves, and most stoves on the market today probably already meet the new standards. Looking at the list, the (non-catalytic) stove I bought 8 years ago (to replace a 30% efficiency old stove) will still be legal to sell under the new rules. I do find the practice of banning the use of existing stoves terrible, but driving up the efficiency of stoves is a good thing, and my current stove produces much more heat than the stove it replaced.

This story does sound a lot like the Republicans screaming ZOMG OBAMA'S TAKING AWAY OUR INCANDESCENT BULBS when it was really Congress saying "oh, hey, light bulbs have to be x% efficient now, but if you can get an incandescent bulb up there, go for it."

Yes, engineers that specialize in thermodynamics and combustion know how to get less smoke out of wood. Their work results in newer, more efficient stove designs. That's kind of what the entire article is about.

That said, the new requirements are mandating technology that was brand new a hell of a long time ago. They aren't mandating brand spanking new, super-duper, mega-expensive stoves. They're mandating stuff that's been in the stores for many, many decades at this point.

As someone who lives in a rural area and burns wood as a secondary heat source (oil is primary), I think this may be getting blown out of proportion.

An overblown story on a website with headlines like "How To Turn Your Home Into A Fortress!" and "Obama Ex-Bodyguard Says Scandals 'Worse Than People Know'"? An overblown story based on an editorial from the Washington Times? An overblown story that defends woodsmoke air pollution by saying it's not as bad as being in a car with a cigarette smoker? Impossible!

Currently home builders have little incentive to put an efficient stove into their buildings. At least in my neck of the woods. This is just a step in that direction: Efficient wood burning devices that pollute less.Joseph Elwell.

Currently home builders have little incentive to put an efficient stove into their buildings. At least in my neck of the woods. This is just a step in that direction: Efficient wood burning devices that pollute less.Joseph Elwell.

We have a wood stove. We haven't used it much for a couple years; but when we did, we did our best to let our wood dry out for a year before burning, and also to keep our fires hot and well oxygenated. As such, you generally wouldn't see smoke coming out of our chimney, just hot air. (That still releases some particulates, I realize)

But a lot of people around here burn wood that's been cut fairly recently, so it still contains a lot of moisture. On top of that, they often manage room temperature by damping - limiting the air flow to the fire . Both practices throw huge amounts of smoke/particulates into the air. I always cringe when I go by a house with smoke belching out the chimney as if it were an old coal-burning freight train.

People bitch and moan about the government meddling in their homes, but in this case it's their own fault. We all have to breathe that exhaust.

Wastes energy and pollutes. The best way is to have thermal storage and burn it hot and quickly with good mixing and an afterburner. I've seen such a setup; it puts out so much heat you never imagined there was so much heat in such a small amount of wood. A day's worth of heat could be done in under an hour but it would have to be stored and it took electricity during the burn for the blower. Water makes for a cheap storage medium; so I don't think the costs would be so bad... But the coolest part was

I have a Jotul F500 stove. It is 75% efficient.
http://jotul.com/us/products/stoves/jotul-f-500-oslo [jotul.com]
When I burn dry wood and the stove is hot, there is no smoke coming out the chimney. Everything gets consumed. The stove recirculates any smoke inside the stove until it is completely burned. If you stand outside my house no matter which side you're on, you don't smell any smoke, and the gases coming out the chimney are clear.
I'm guessing that many perceived problems with stoves are caused by people who don't know how to properly operate their stoves. They're burning wet wood, they have a very old inefficient stove, they aren't controlling the airflow well, they aren't burning outside air, etc.
A modern wood stove is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to heat your house. You're burning renewable energy. I'm bothered by people here in upstate NY who put anti-fraking signs in their hard but who also heat with gas. Hypocrites.

In places where it gets very cold, the way to do it (as others I think are pointing out) is retrofit-assistance and (probably more importantly) insulation assistance programs, like we have in much of New England, so that people can still burn wood, but burn a lot less of it, and actually be more comfortable. Our small house has been well insulated recently and I expect to go from using around 600 gallons of oil a year to around 400, maybe even 300 if I'm careful. If I was using wood, there would be a similar decrease in the amount of wood I'd need to burn to stay warm.

In the 21st century, it just makes plain sense that building envelope and R-value should be every homeowner's first and second thoughts when heating any home, especially when doing so with the intent to keep from freezing to death. In a (very) well insulted home, it's possible to (easily) keep from freezing to death with little more than a few warm bodies, good clothing and maybe candle or two -- so a high-efficiency heating device, much smaller than you'd need in a conventionally-insulated house, will easily keep you very comfortable in such a home.

I support raising the standards for new stoves, but since many people with not much money depend on the things, I think they over did it by banning trade-ins unless rendered inoperative. If they feel that strongly, there should be a tax credit on the trade-in to compensate for the lost value of that trade-in. That would make it perfectly reasonable.

Most people don't realize, but wood-burning is the sleeping giant of renewable energy. It's the largest form of renewable energy consumption in the U.S. If you look at the EIA's energy source breakdown [eia.gov], wood falls under biomass. It comprises about half the total renewable energy we produce, and accounts for nearly twice as much energy as hydroelectric (the next largest renewable). Even for electricity generation which isn't wood's forte (heating is), wood is third after hydro and wind, and far ahead of PV solar.

I'm all for cleaner wood-burning stoves. But it has to be done in a cost-effective manner, lest you drive people to dirtier options like coal or oil.

Apparently not. He doesn't know that I can pay $1,000 for a tank of oil... or $200 for a cord of wood. And the cord of wood heats better. Turn the heat down? Yeah, I tried that... and the guy who came to repair my pipes pointed out that up north, water freezes when it gets below 32F.

As a Washington State resident, there are many counties that are wood only heating. Pierce and Tacoma have large suburbs and are not exactly off the grid living. They are bigger and can force the smaller population to upgrade. The counties like Stevens, Ferry and Okanogan are mostly wood heated homes. I have no real numbers but out of the 39 counties in Washington, I'd say at least 1/2 have majority of wood only heated homes, we still are a big wild state.

My mothers county has many people that are wood only, and if they went around giving $1000 dollar fines for people burning, they would tar and feather and hold a recall election. Those urban counties are gray haired monsters who know each other and would put pressure to any elected official.

Those poor gray haired women are the Majority of voters, tell them they cant heat their homes. Most of these people live in urban areas that dont have fire departments, police or or trash pick up. Tacoma I'd say is much different, its urban sprawl.

it's ok to dump carbon into the atmosphere, and fuck up the planet for everyone?

Any carbon you release from burning wood is only there because the tree sequestered it when it was growing. For most trees that's probably somewhere in the region of 20-50 years. In geological & ecological terms that's nothing, and the net effect is no additional carbon dioxide.

The problem with burning fossil fuels is that it releases carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago over a period of hundreds of thousands of years; so what we're doing is very rapidly re-introducing a bunch of carbon dioxide that wasn't in the atmosphere for several million years. From a geological & ecological point of view, it looks like a net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

I like to season it, then split it, so I don't break my back whacking needlessly with the maul. Storing in a dry place decreases the amount of stress you have lighting it after seasoning.Personally I just like a little vinegar and pepper, learned that from Euell Gibbons.

Frankly , Yes!I do want to see more people use wood burning rocket mass heaters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSN0E87eKu4&list=PL5QAC2bkSOuIYuBObCP4bllBEFea_8uJ0 [youtube.com]Because it takes a whole lot less wood and the output amounts to some steam, the heat from a few handfuls of wood can heat for a couple days at 30F in some cases.A lot like dome architecture for tornado and hurricane states, local official morons need to be educated about the " cutting edge" antiquities at our disposal.Rocket mass heaters would easily save loads over gas, coal oil, electricity, and have the advantage of not being a polluting, costly mess like the aforementioned.Of course it doesn't drive commerce, so you get to pay for electing idiots or do some very hard convincing, because after all, we're talking about bureaucrats.

I burn 6-8 cord of wood per year and have a very, very small natural gas bill. The stove at the moment is burning three or four logs and the house is nice and warm--it stays warm at night until about -15C if the wind is up or -20C if calm and is fed about every 4 hours.

How efficiently? I'm burning wood right now too, but I don't have any delusions that it doesn't cause pollution. I'd have difficulty quantifying how much exactly, but that's what the EPA is for. Apparently, it's too much.
If they really want to make a difference, they're going to have to crack down on coal burning stoves too: wood stoves are designed to burn hot, to make the fire more efficient and less polluting, but since coal doesn't have that problem you can get a coal burning stove that will happily maintain a very low fire. And there's no reason you can't just put your wood in there...

The stove is about 80%. I burn good wood in it and we use it for base heat. I also have a Tulikivi centrally located on the main floor of the house, which can get to 90% efficient. We use that for 1-2 burns a day on the coldest stretches and let the soapstone radiate the rest of the day.

A neighbor of mine uses coal. It's a different heat than wood and very nice and much less finicky than wood.

The kinds of stoves and fireplaces that the EPA is banning are the bullcrap kinds that builders put in new homes. These are not serious devices for heating homes, they are purely entertainment, so people can watch the pretty flames. Some fireplaces are so poor that they actually have negative efficiency. The house would stay warmer if the fireplace was not used.

Most people don't understand how bad a typical fireplace is. They're hung up on the romance of it. People don't remember what it was like 100 years ago, before we had central heating and A/C. Heating a home with a wood burning iron stove in the kitchen and fireplaces in half the rooms was hugely labor intensive. Takes a lot of wood to keep all that going. Have to gather wood and chop it into small pieces. Have to clean the ashes out regularly, and check on the fires frequently, make sure they are under control. There's nothing romantic about all that labor to those who lived that way. They were glad to be done with fires when alternatives became available. And fire is dangerous. An accident can easily burn the house down. Burns from accidentally brushing against the stove were another danger. Finally, they don't heat a house that well. Heat doesn't circulate that readily. The iron stove can keep the kitchen too hot while the bedrooms remain freezing cold.

The kinds of stoves and fireplaces that the EPA is banning are the bullcrap kinds that builders put in new homes. These are not serious devices for heating homes, they are purely entertainment, so people can watch the pretty flames. Some fireplaces are so poor that they actually have negative efficiency. The house would stay warmer if the fireplace was not used.

Even the best fireplaces are inefficient crap compared to a stove. Ben Franklin realized that. The German settlers mostly used stoves, but the English settlers stuck with fireplaces. He tried to get them to switch because the stoves were 2x as efficient.

That's just it... burning wood for heat is fine, so long as it is a clean heating unit that burns wood at the right temp so that it doesn't release as much into the air and actually uses most of the heat for the home.

But isn't that what the EPA is saying? You can have your wood burning stove, so long as it isn't a crappy one.

Just like 10 SEER AC units used to be legal, now they are not, 13 is the minimum. Frankly it should be higher, the cost to go from a 13 SEER to a 16 SEER isn't that much, this past summer our downstairs AC unit went out, compressor failed. We replaced both units (upstairs and downstairs) with new 16 SEER dual stage units and our AC bill went down 30%.

The price difference between the 13 and 16 SEER units? Total of about $4000, that will be paid back in less than 2 years with the power savings (our old units were 13 SEER models).

That being said, the payback on my power bill is about 20 months, that is the break even point, after all it is pure profit.

I financed the thing over 60 months at 4.9% anyway, so the monthly payment isn't actually that bad and the lower power bill offsets about half of the monthly payment, so my actual out of pocket costs isn't all that high each month, less than our family cell phone bills, and we just made a big cut in our carbon foot print.

As a side benefit, the system does a better job cooling the house and keeping it even, since it is a 2 stage unit, it has a slower speed to run at to maintain the temp and be more efficient.

The price difference between the 13 and 16 SEER units? Total of about $4000, that will be paid back in less than 2 years with the power savings (our old units were 13 SEER models).

It's a damn shame that apartment owners don't care how much you spend on heating and AC. Idealy there should be higher standards on rented units especially given how many properties are being converted to rentals.

Another problem is that unless it is to repair and replace something, often apartment buildings lose any other grandfathered code items. For instance, I used to own two 6 unit rental properties located right beside each other. If I wanted to install more efficient heating and cooling in those units, I would also have to update the wiring to the entire lot because the code change about 10 years after they were built, I would have to add fire escapes to every one of the second story levels of the unites with

Yep, but then I probably use more electricity than the average person (most people probably don't have 2 complete HVAC systems with 8 tons of cooling). I typed up all the details in a lower post, but I'll repeat them here.

...

(copied from another post in this story)

I'll provide a few more details.

1. I live in Texas, it gets to over 100 in the summer here and tends to stay there for 2 months.

2. I have a large 2 story home, about 4,000 sqft, 5 bedrooms and 5 of us live here, so we use all of it.

Not so much, no. Apparently there is some history you aren't acquainted with. As used in contemporary America, liberal politics are associated with "progressive" politics. Fascism was also aligned with progressivism.

In his brilliant new book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg (a colleague of mine) demonstrates how the opposite is the case, that fascism was a movement of the left and that liberal heroes like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were products of what Goldberg calls “the fascist moment” in America early in the 20th century....

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fascist party, its program called for implementing a minimum wage, expropriating property from landowners, repealing titles of nobility, creating state-run secular schools and imposing a progressive tax rate. Mussolini took socialism and turned it in a more populist and militaristic direction, but remained a modernizing, secular man of the left....

On the other hand, the progressive movement of the early 20th century looked to Mussolini as an inspiration and shared intellectual roots with European fascism, including an appreciation of the “top-down socialism” of Otto von Bismarck. Goldberg eviscerates Woodrow Wilson as the closest we have ever had to a fascist president. Wilson and his supporters welcomed World War I as an opportunity to expand the state, instituting “war socialism” and a far-reaching crackdown on dissent.

FDR picked up where Wilson left off. The crisis of the Great Depression was the occasion for reviving “war socialism.” The man who ran the National Recovery Administration was an open admirer of Mussolini, and the alphabet soup of New Deal agencies had their roots in World War I and the classic fascist impulse to mobilize society and put it on a war footing.

Poor libertarians had to make up a word to distinguish themselves from "liberals".

Don't you worry. There's a concerted, intense, yet subtle effort to make the general (uninformed, won't do their own research) public believe that each and every "libertarian" is the exact same thing as an "anarcho-capitalist". Got to make sure the whole freedom-loving movement doesn't catch on and become popular, you know, and to make sure of that it must be demonized as emotionally and unreasonably and quickly as possible. When people otherwise sympathetic to the desire for freedom are hesitant to call

The reason I mention is is because valley communities in Alaska have some of the poorest air quality in all of the United States.

Have a look at the following link. There aren't any current advisories, but in an area the rest of us might assume is some sort of pristine wilderness, in terms of air quality, Alaska it is anything but pristine.